The Quiet Game

"You want the neighbors asking everybody what the sheriff's department was doing at your folks' house?"

I look up the street. There are still lights in a few windows. "How do I know you're not in with whoever shot at me tonight?"

"If I wanted you dead, your mama would be at the funeral home right now."

This is easy enough to believe. "Okay. Ride."

Ike Ransom drives up to the bypass and heads south. Most of the traffic is eighteen-wheelers bound north for the interstate junction sixty miles away, or west for the bridge over the Mississippi.

"What's this about, Ike?"

He glances at me. "You know me?"

"My friend did. What's the big secret?"

"It's about Del Payton."

"I told you I didn't want to hear about that."

"It's about you and Del both."

"Me and Del? I was only eight years old when the guy died."

He looks at me again, the yellow sclera of his eyes washed white by oncoming headlights. "He didn't die, college boy. He was murdered. There's a difference. You and him tied together, though. Ain't no doubt about that."

"How do you figure that?"

"First tell me why you said what you said in the paper."

"I was talking through my hat. I wasn't thinking."

"That newspaper bitch didn't pick Del's name out of the blue."

"I mentioned him."

"There you go."

I sigh in frustration. "I'm lost, Ike."

"That's for damn sure. Can't you see? Del died thirty years ago and nobody paid for it. His soul ain't never been at rest. It's been wandering 'round here all this time, looking for peace. But it can't get no peace. Not while his killers walk free."

Maybe Ike the Spike is some kind of religious nut.

"Now, here you come, thirty years later, and in one day you got more people talking about Del's killing than they was the day he died."

"That wasn't my intent."

"That don't matter. Don't you see? What goes around comes around! You just an instrument. An instrument of a higher power."

"I'm a guy with a big mouth. I'm not an instrument of anything."

Ransom shakes his head and laughs with eerie certainty. "You just sit tight. You gonna understand everything in a minute. You gonna thank old Ike for this one."

He turns right at the Ford dealership and crosses Lower Woodville Road near the paper mill, which glows fluorescent in the dark like a small city, churning white smoke into the night sky.

"Where are we going? The river?"

"Battery plant."

"The battery plant? What for?"

"Privacy. They closed right now. Asian market's down. They crank back up in thirty-six hours."

There are few lights on this road. Beneath the sulfurous odor of the paper mill drifts the thick, ripe smell of kudzu, sweetened by a breath of honeysuckle. The river is only six hundred yards away, and just a few feet below our present elevation.

The dark skeleton of the Triton Battery plant materializes to our right as Ike turns onto Gate Street, then right again into a parking lot lighted by the pink glow of mercury vapor. The Triton Battery Company came to Natchez in 1936 to build batteries for Pullman rail cars. In 1940 they retooled the line to manufacture batteries for diesel submarines. After the war it was truck batteries, marine batteries, whatever fit the changing market. The last I heard, Triton was using its ancient equipment to produce motorcycle batteries for European manufacturers.

Ike stops the cruiser on the far side of the parking lot. We're sitting on an acre of gravel packed into dirt by years of hard use, bordered on three sides by trees and unkempt grass. The west side faces the main gate of the battery plant, with Gate Street running between. I used to bring girls out here in high school.

"Is this where Del Payton died?"

"This it," Ransom says. "Come on."

"Where?"

He laughs harshly. "You a nervous son of a bitch, ain't you? Come on."

I get out of the cruiser and follow him across the gravel. A massive old pecan tree grows out of a clump of grass at the center of the lot. The spaces in its shade are probably coveted by everyone who uses the lot.

Ransom stops ten yards short of the tree, his back to me.

"Thirty years," he says. "Thirty years ago Del Payton parked his Fairlane right in this spot. When he came out of the plant, the bomb was in his car." He half turns to me and spits on the gravel. "I seen car bombs go off, man. It's a motherfucker. That fire burned forty minutes before they got it out. Del was sitting behind the wheel all that time."

I stand silent in the buzzing of the lights, wondering where Ike Ransom has seen car bombs go off. He squats on his haunches and picks up a piece of gravel.

"A man's soul left this earth right here."

I walk a few steps closer. "Look, Ike… I know what happened that night. And I'm damn sorry it did. But I don't see any connection to me."

He stands and points at me, his black eyes smoldering. "I'm gonna say two words, college boy. After that you gonna be in this thing up to your neck."

"Okay."

"Leo Marston."

He watches me as though waiting for me to guess a riddle.

"Leo Marston? I don't get it. What-"

"Judge… Leo… Marston."